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For the first time since the start of the COVID pandemic, I went to the movies and saw Oppenheimer on the wide screen, the way an epic film of this magnitude is meant to be seen. It’s based on the 2005 book The American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin. For a biographical picture that’s about the man behind the hydrogen bomb, most of us know how the story ends from history books.
I’ve been fascinated by the Promethean myth since my college years, and it features prominently in my upcoming book to be published in early 2024. It differentiates between human intelligence (Promethean), and natural intelligence (Gaian). It is the former that must be nested in the latter if we are to overcome our developmental barriers and have a chance at addressing planetary challenges and be able to mitigate societal and ecological collapse.
As the myth goes, Prometheus was a Titan god who created man out of clay. He stole fire from Mount Olympus and gave it to humanity in the form of art, science, technology and innovation. This act of defiance angered Zeus, the king of the Olympian gods who punished Prometheus by chaining him to a rock where an eagle would eat his liver every day, but due to his immortal nature, the liver would regenerate overnight. The regeneration symbolizes human resilience.
This mythical narrative is intended to show the dual nature of the binary world, the pair of opposites that came into existence when the universe was born. It is memorialized in the Promethean act of bestowing genius on humanity and the punishment he suffered for that bestowal. It is the yin and yang, the darkness and light that keep the cosmos in balance.
To me, Prometheus represents a pre-Anthropogenic form of arrogance of the modern mind that greatly ignores the delicate balance inherent in the pair of opposites. It still associates itself with the one-sided Western view of human exceptionalism, a fallacy that began when Enlightenment was handed down to those with less awareness of the binary nature of the universe; the politicians and the plutocrats who run the world. That one- sidedness has continued unabated with layers of complexity that have only contributed to our further departure from the original form of exceptionalism, that of nature. The scientific revolution and our modern mind sought to separate us from the natural order and make us superior to it. We saw the light and we saw that it was good and we dismissed the darkness. We also saw the good side of our genius, but dismissed its evil opposite. We built a modern civilization and a global economy based on those assumptions ignoring the fact that the unexamined opposite side of the binary universe does not go away, it becomes part of our collective unconscious that sooner or later will appear in our lives as fate.
The Enlightenment and Promethean intelligence represent the Orange level in the Spiral Dynamics model and stage five in Clare W. Graves’ ECLET model. Both models have eight, hierarchically ordered developmental stages which, along with Ken Wilber’s integral model are – in my opinion – quickly becoming obsolete. This is happening due to a general absence of Anthropogenic awareness within the models’ respective communities of practitioners. Our planet is going through epochal change that will render most of what we’ve known obsolete, yet like a frog in a slowly boiling pot we are not aware of the danger. In my new book, I make an effort to trigger that awareness and keep the original Gravesian model current by reinterpreting its content in ways that distinguish between the Holocene Life Conditions during which Beck and Wilber created their models, and the Anthropocene Life Conditions, for which my book will make the first attempt at keeping the model relevant. In my new work, I associate the model’s pre Anthropogenic intelligence with Promethean intelligence, and the Anthropocene with Gaian intelligence; the former acting as a trim tab for the latter. In other words, if we are to survive climate change and ecological collapse, we must subordinate human/Promethean intelligence to natural/Gaian intelligence.
If this shocks you, let me explain:
Many individuals who identify with Promethean intelligence see the dual nature of things, but others, especially those who are motivated by profit, or driven by Newtonian reductionism, don’t. Even the few who are conscious of the dark side are often prevented from speaking about it, especially after the symbolic fire in the Promethean myth gives birth to their genius inventions and the creation is handed over to those in power. More likely than not, those in power have no awareness of the dark side of genius, or don’t fully understand the power of the dark side. In the movie, Oppenheimer’s struggles with the dark side of the atomic bomb are on full display as he grapples with existential psychological and ethical issues while working on building it. In the aftermath of the bombing of Japan, he became an advocate for the peaceful use of the technology (attempts to mitigate the dark side), for which he was humiliated and discredited by those who held power over him.
The repression of the dark side of genius is at the heart of how Promethean intelligence in the hands of those who hold power became the primary cause of much of the existential problems we’re faced with today, not the least of which is climate change. Today, we are dealing with the largest collective shadow in human history. It is the accumulation of the dark side of our binary world that we have ignored and externalized to our environment over the last five centuries. This darkness is so enormous, it has pushed several earth systems passed their carrying capacity making ecological collapse inevitable, and climate-driven events increasingly unpredictable and more devastating in scale.
What the modern-day Prometheus has forgotten is that billions of years before he was enlightened, intelligence existed in nature that was embodied in another Greek deity named Gaia, the mother of all things. She is the primordial Goddess who emerged from Chaos and gave form to the air the sea and the land. She has evolved her earthly systems for billions of years and given life to billions of species, while balancing the pair of opposites through her autopoietic intelligence, and feedback loops accounting for the darkness and the light at every fractal level without exception and without ever having to repress one side in favor of the other.
Awareness of the dark side of Promethean genius permeates the entire movie. One of the highlights came half way through it when Oppenheimer showed the hydrogen bomb calculations to Albert Einstein, who simply asks: “what can it do?” Oppenheimer responded with: “It can destroy the world.” In the final scene they meet again and Oppenheimer says: “When I came to you with those calculations, we thought we might start a chain reaction that might destroy the entire world.” Einstein asks: “What of it?” Oppenheimer responds with: “I believe we did.”
Climate change may not destroy the world as quickly as a hydrogen bomb, but it is just as deadly if we continue to ignore the dark side of existence. Addressing earth systems issues is a task that requires an end to our separation from and superiority over nature. Without returning to the fold of Gaian intelligence, human intelligence is doomed and it will be the primary cause that places the planet on the path toward a Sixth Extinction.
Millions of years from now, if there is an intelligence capable of reading the geologic record, it will likely find an anomaly that is unlike any other in our planet’s history; a creature with a big brain who walked on two legs and in a blink of an eye destroyed what took Mother Nature billions of years to build.